What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From A Sport Psychologist For Olympians

‘Take one for the team.’ ‘Teed up.’ ‘Knock it out of the park.’ ‘Behind the eight ball.’ The business world has appropriated both language and concepts from the sports world, much of it actually appropriate, from hitting home runs to the importance of team. In sport psychology there’s also much that translates, from the use of mental imagery to establishing performance routines to managing stress, fatigue and burnout. Think about it. Entrepreneurs need to be like high-performance athletes – their company, their team depend on their talents and ability to perform – so why not tap the knowledge of a sport psychologist? We did. And what we learned about performance readiness planning, rethinking positive thinking and building resilience to stress can absolutely fuel success in the realm of entrepreneurship.

We spoke with Alex Cohen, who as Senior Sport Psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee has worked with many elite athletes. Knowing that we are tackling the emotional and mental challenges faced by entrepreneurs, during our conversation Cohen couched much of his work in terms of entrepreneurship. At the same time, just about every time he says athlete, you can certainly insert founder or entrepreneur. To lay the groundwork for success, he explained, ‘Individually for every athlete I work with, I try to have what I call a performance readiness plan.’ He then detailed how much of the underlying ideas behind that planning are based on 20 years of research by psychologist Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, who has completely reshaped how we should think about positive thinking.

Alex Cohen at the Sochi, Russia, Olympics.Alex Cohen

Rethinking Positive Thinking

‘She wanted to figure out how positive thinking works, and found out that by itself it really doesn’t,’ Cohen said. In other words, a positive mental attitude or positive thinking alone doesn’t work. Research has made that clear. To quote Oettingen, she stated, ‘Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.’ Something more is needed. Cohen continued, ‘So she had to figure out what really works to motivate people and get them through or around barriers and handle stress. She came up with a model that she calls Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intention.’ Defined succinctly, it’s about contrasting a desired positive goal with the very real obstacles to get there, and then forming ‘if-then’ plans to overcome the obstacles that might arise.

This notion of mental contrasting absolutely applies to entrepreneurs who can face so many obstacles and unknowns. Consider that Cohen essentially uses SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) with his athletes. ‘I don’t use those terms but it gets to the same place,’ he said. ‘With the performance readiness plan, building around strengths is pretty critical to helping somebody achieve goal. That mental contrasting piece of looking at internal obstacles is a way of capturing either weaknesses or areas for improvement or opportunity.’

Performance Readiness Plan For When Things Go Sideways

Performance readiness is essential for when plans go awry in the face of adversity. To make the point, Cohen began by quoting the famous and infamous boxer Mike Tyson: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ Cohen then put it in terms as it relates to the elite athletes he works with: ‘So a lot of people sort of think just think positively but they don’t always have a plan when things go sideways. At least in an Olympic or professional sport, you might feel great maybe 10% of the time, and the rest of the time you may not have your A Game or things may not be easy.’ He pointed out that the same goes for entrepreneurs who might have to pivot or find a meeting with potential investors going sideways. ‘These things happen all the time. But if you have to decide in the moment what to do, often it’s too late.’ That’s why the mental contrasting, i.e., the if-then planning for various scenarios or sequences of events, is so important.

‘With contrasting, I start out with your goal, or your wish, your dream, whatever it is,’ Cohen elaborated, ‘to start a business or to perform at the Olympics, and want you to really feel what that would be like, what that would look like, what the outcomes would be. And then you contrast that with internal obstacles that might get in the way, whether it some internal distraction or pressure that you are putting on yourself to perform, or to meet quarterly goals. You can’t necessarily control your competition in sports or business, but you can mindfully manage your reaction to those internal obstacles when they come up.’

This mental contrasting and planning applies to all aspects of life. ‘The classic example is of someone coming into an office and they’re trying to eat healthier,’ Cohen explained, ‘but they’re really hungry. Inevitably somebody’s brought a box of donuts to the office. If you have to decide at the moment – are you going to have one or not – it’s too late. You have to decide it ahead of time how you are going to react when that sort of internal challenge comes up. I’m not going to reach for a donut. I’m going to grab this healthy snack that I brought for myself.’ Again, for an entrepreneur, it’s thinking about scenarios like if we don’t get this investor or customer, then we’ll do this. Writing out the if-then scenarios is a great way to keep it crystal clear in your head. ‘Thinking through these things ahead of time allows you to be more ready to make decisions,’ Cohen said. ‘What are my actual actions going to look like? Having that plan can help increase coping skills and reduce stress.’

The Importance Of Pre-performance Routine

Combining such a plan with training and routines can improve execution, again, whether you’re an athlete or an entrepreneur. ‘Performance is on demand execution of what you learned,’ explained Cohen. ‘Like I said, 10% of the time you may feel great, but the rest of the time something might be off, whether you don’t feel good, or you’re not as rested, or you don’t like the weather. Maybe it’s you get toothpaste on your tie as you’re getting ready in the morning. So I think having a really good pre-performance routine will help with that, and that’s something we build into the performance readiness plan.’ Those routines could include listening to music, having a checklist, mental rehearsing, and breathing, among others. But routine means routine: a regular sequence of actions.

The routine carries over into the actual performance and knowing how you’re going to respond if something isn’t going as well as you desire. ‘If you go into that meeting or you go into a ski race, your expectation is that everything is going to feel great, so it’s easy to panic if things don’t feel great,’ Cohen said. ‘You can remove that panic piece if you’ve decided ahead of time, Alright, well if things go sideways, here’s how I’m going to react, here’s some places I can go with this. In the sports sense that would be, I can work on regulating my energy, through breathing and imagery, and or I can focus on where I send my attention.’

Watch Out For Self-conscious Mindshift

Cohen than explained how our mindset can shift come execution time and we get in our own way. ‘Often whether it’s public speaking or going to an important investor meeting or getting ready for an Olympic performance, we can become very self-conscious,’ he said. ‘There can be an internal shift in attention and we’re thinking about how to perform. So if you find yourself getting stuck in your head, or thinking about how to do it, you can step all over your words, for example, and not come across as professionally as you want. You don’t want to be thinking about how to, you just want to do it automatically. Being able to make it happen even when things don’t feel good often comes down to a commitment to focusing on a good external awareness.’ For a skier dropping into a halfpipe, it might be a focus on speed. For an entrepreneur pitching, it might be making eye contact.

Interestingly, we’ve had a number of entrepreneurs tell us they have to work on getting out of their own way, and part of the problem is their internal voice and getting stuck in their head. Another problem they cite is wanting things to be too perfect. Cohen echoed this too. ‘In many performance settings you don’t necessarily have to do something new or special or different. Trust your training whether it is having been in a lot of performance settings before or been in a lot of investor meetings before, or it’s role-playing with your colleagues. Just trust your training. Then if you don’t get in your own way, it’s probably going to be pretty good. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just have to not take yourself out of it.’ That latter comment really hits home: You just want to be in the game.

Being properly prepared – from training to planning – will keep you in the game. It can also ease the pressure and stress you feel. ‘That execution isn’t going to happen under pressure if you haven’t trained,’ Cohen emphasized. ‘You can’t just flip that switch and say okay it’s going to be easy to just focus on this no matter what. So you have to build it into your daily practice. How am I going to handle this investor? How am I going to handle the Olympics? It’s simulating pressure situations. And pressure is really just a lack of preparation.’ Pressure is just a lack of preparation. Think about that simple statement. If you know in your gut you’ve done everything to prepare for your entrepreneurial journey, well, what’s to worry about? You’ve done your best to make a success of it.

We work as a team to capture the most impactful stories and solutions on the wild emotional and mental rollercoaster entrepreneurs contend with daily. Pierson is a serial entrepreneur who at the age of 15 founded an action sports film company; then several years later an act...